Kinds of night, and settling one

Not every night is a show. What kind of night a date is decides how it can be paid, whether bands can ask for it, and — the part people do not expect — whether its headcount says anything about the act.

The four kinds

• Ticketed — there is a door charge. Revenue splits are allowed, and the headcount counts as the act's draw.
• No cover — no door charge; the room earns on bar and food. Flat fee only.
• Private rental — someone hires the room. Never offered to bands, and the guests are the host's, not the act's.
• No live music — the room is open with nobody on stage. This is the yardstick every other night gets measured against.

You set this on the date itself, and you can correct it later. Dates generated from a recurring pattern take the pattern's type, so if you set the pattern up before you knew, fix the pattern too or it will keep making the wrong kind.

Why a rental never gets a per-head figure

Ten weddings at 120 guests would otherwise sit in an act's history looking like a 120-head average next to real ones. Those guests came for the host. So a rental records its numbers and is deliberately given no spend-per-head at all.

Holding and offering a date

• Hold it — pencil the date for one act while they decide. Every hold runs out on its own, and the date opens back up when it does.
• Offer it — ask a band whether they want the night. An offer asks; it puts nothing on their calendar until they say yes, and saying yes books it.
• Free that night — bands you are connected to who marked this date open, quietest calendar first. One click offers it to them.

A band that marked nothing is not busy — plenty of acts never fill their calendar in. You can offer the date to anyone you are connected to.

Tonight

One screen for the night itself: who is playing, the running order you sent them, who is working, how the door list is going, and a button to settle it. Built for a phone at 7pm and again at 1am.

A show with nobody rostered is called out, because that is the thing worth spotting from the door rather than at the end of the month.

Residencies

Booking an act for every third Thursday until June is one decision, so it takes one action. It books the dates already on your calendar that are still free — it never creates nights you haven't opened — and tells you how many it had to skip.

Deposits on private hires

Record what the host put down and mark it received when it lands, so you can see which hires are still outstanding. Like the room fee, a deposit never counts toward what the crowd spent — the host paid it, not the people in the room.

The settlement sheet

Once a night is settled, the act's page carries a sheet you can print or screenshot and hand over: the fee, the house tab, and on a night paying a share of the door, the door and the percentage it was taken from. Your bar and food are on no sheet, on any deal.

The guest list

Put names on the door, tick them off as they arrive, and the number who actually came in becomes your comps figure when you settle. The act can add their own names from their side, up to whatever allowance you agree.

• Expected and arrived are different numbers. Forty names where eleven turn up is eleven comps — that is the figure that matters.
• A party of four where two showed is two; tick the count as they come in.
• It suggests the comps figure rather than setting it, because you will always wave someone in who was never on a list.
• Going over an act's allowance is reported, not blocked. It is your door.

Confirming it in writing

Draft a confirmation from the booking — it fills itself in from the date, the times, the deal and anything you have advanced — edit the wording, and send it. The act reads it and accepts by typing their name. They don't need an account here.

• Once sent it can't be edited. That is the point of having it in writing; to change it, withdraw it first, which breaks their link.
• It states the act's fee, because a confirmation without one confirms nothing.
• On a night paying a share of the door it states the percentage and not an amount — nobody knows the amount until the night is counted, and your takings are not on it.

Advancing the show

The details everyone needs settled before the night: load-in, soundcheck, doors, when they go on, what backline you provide, what they get fed, where to park, and who to call. Fill it in as answers arrive, then send it to the act.

• Saving and sending are separate — an advance gets filled in over weeks, and an act who gets four half-written versions stops reading them.
• Once sent, the act sees it on their gig and can reply with what they need from you.
• Your sound engineer sees the running order and the backline on their own schedule.

There is no money anywhere on an advance — no fee, no door, no costs. That is exactly why the same record can be shared with the act and the engineer without exposing anything of yours.

Settling a night

At the end of the night you record what actually happened. On a ticketed night the door comes from your ticket sales and is not typed in by hand; everything else is.

• Door — what came in on admission.
• Bar and food — kept separate, because plenty of rooms have one and not the other, and you will want to see which of the two a given act moves.
• Room fee, on a private rental — what the host paid to hire the room.
• Heads through the door, and how many of those came in free.

Spend per head is the door, bar and food together, divided by everyone who came through the door. The room fee is deliberately left out of it: the host paid that, not the crowd, and folding it in would make any act booked onto a wedding look extraordinary.

Blank is not zero. A room that does not serve food leaves food empty, and it stays out of the arithmetic rather than dragging every average down.

What settling locks

Settling the night is the moment the act got paid, and from there the figures anyone is owed against stop moving:

• Ticket sales, and the door they add up to.
• The night's bar, food, attendance and comps.
• The deal on any act playing that night.
• Staff shift rates, and other costs recorded against the night.

Marking someone as paid still works afterwards, on purpose. Settling the night and actually handing over the money are two different moments, and they are rarely the same one.

Made a mistake? Reopen the night, fix it, settle it again. Settling destroys nothing — it just stops things moving.